My Son Zachary

SO MANY WEEKS, so many months, were like this, hope and then crushed hope. But like his brother, Zachary had made the choice of the heart that there was a world out there worth witnessing. Like his brother, he had a determination to see what might exist out~ side that intensive care nursery where day was night and night was day. Bit by bit, the level of oxygen he needed ratcheted down. Gram by gram, he gained weight. He stabilized. He continued to make progress without slipping backwards.

After seven months, he came home. His lungs were still underdeveloped, so he could only breathe with the aid of a nasal cannula attached to the end of a thin tube from an oxygen tank. The doctors told us he was, in fact, the first premature baby still on oxygen that Pennsylvania Hospital had ever released.

But he was home. Zachary was home.

An unimaginable ordeal was over, but it would only be succeeded by other ones. Looking back on it, I believe that Debra and I had no real idea of what we had been through except that we had somehow been through it. The scarring had run deep, but we presumed that the worst was over, it must be over, how could it not be over, and we were utterly unprepared—to be a husband and wife, to be a father and mother, to understand the reality of the life that lay ahead for our son who had just come back to us still wedded to a lifeline of oxygen.

The first hint of that reality had come several months earlier, when Debra’s father had come to the hospital. He was a professor of genetics with extensive medical knowledge, and his very first question to he doctors was about the risk of brain damage because of oxygen deprivation at birth. The doctors hemmed and hawed and shuffled, as doctors are trained to do when a zone of discomfort has been discovered. I found the question offensive. The very idea of positing something so horrifying and negative when there they lay, his grandchildren, on those sheets of white cloth, covered by crisscrossing tubes. But later, when he watched Gerry and Zachary through the observation window, something happened. He was a man of grave assessment, given to blunt opinion, but the sight of those two little boys defused him. “This is the one time where all the science and all the biology can’t explain what is happening,” he said quietly.

Like the rest of us who watched and visited, he was awestruck by what he saw. He believed in the miracle of those boys, the wonder and will of their survival, the wonder and will of their survival. But he was still a man of science, and I think he knew all along that there are no such things as miracles, just the belief in them.